Mobile Tartu 2024
June 10, 2024
a tool is a … piece of software or online service; a model … is method or process that is expounded in theoretical terms; software is … instructions that underlies digital tools Lovelace (2021)
Reproducible research: Other people can re-generate your results
Open source software: Software that is free to use and modify
Open access tools: Web applications for transport planning that are based on open source software, that anyone can use
Open access data: Data that is freely available to use and share
Future-proof work that is likely to be useful in the medium-term future
Reproducibility is a continuous variable (Peng 2011)
Source: Raff (2023)
Time
Know-how
Lack of permission
Software is not open
Data is not open access
Someone might use it in unethical ways
Someone might “steal” the work
Lovelace, Tennekes, and Carlino (2022)
Illustration of the ClockBoard zoning system used to visualize a geographically dependendent phenomena: air quality, measured in mass of PM10 particles, measured in micrograms per cubic meter, from the London Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (LAEI). The facets show the data in spatial grid available from the LAEI, facet Am and aggregated to London boroughs B, to ClockBoard zones covering all the input data shown in C, and ClockBoard zones clipped by the administrative boundary of Greater London in D.
Premise: A key reason for reproducibility is generalisability.
Source: situational-awareness.ai
transport planning software was originally designed in the late 1950s and onwards to plan for
increased use of cars [for personal travel], and trucks for deliveries and goods movement Boyce and Williams (2015)
Thankfully that is no longer a priority:
Policy drivers have changed dramatically since then: climate change mitigation, air quality improvement and public health are prioritised in the emergent ‘sustainable mobility paradigm’ Lovelace (2021)
How could/should/will demand shift in the future?
Source: https://situational-awareness.ai
IT sector was already poised to become a decarbonisation bottleneck
Source: theregister.com and Gupta et al. (2021)
Reproducible research is a key part of future-proofing transport planning, for your work, and for the discipline as a whole
Open source software and open access tools are key to this, especially if you want to have humans in the loop
AI is not a panacea, and has its own environmental costs
In this context, there are some key desirable features of future-proof transport models and associated software and tools: